Many governments around the world are creating regulations that allow a cognitive radio (CR) to operate in certain frequency bands (e.g. whitespace frequency bands). For example, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States has already passed such regulations, Office of Communications (OFCOM) in the UK has announced it will develop such regulations, the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT)/Electronic Communications Committee (ECC) in Europe is also developing requirements for regulations. To access the white space bands, each regulatory group generally may request that the CR perform a lookup into a white space spectrum database before it can transmit. This lookup is required in order to prevent the CR transmissions, for example, from interfering with other transmissions on a white space frequency band.
Each regulatory group will likely write slightly different regulations defining how a CR and a white space spectrum database are to interoperate. While the concept remains generally the same, each country or region may have slightly different variations in precisely what information is exchanged between the CR and a white space spectrum database. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Protocol to Access White Space database (PAWS) working group is also defining a standards track protocol which can be used globally by devices to contact a white space spectrum database. This protocol may satisfy the regulations of each country or region. While the protocol enables a common language for communication between CR and database, each region may have a separate dialect of this protocol in order to properly implement the variations in requirements. One example is that the regulations in the US do not include a maximum transmit power for a given radio frequency; while the preliminary requirements in Europe do include a maximum transmit power for each frequency. Even with the variance between regulatory requirements of different countries, current CR's are generally configured for a single regulatory environment.